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Saudi Arabia introduces voting rights for women
Posted On Aug 25 2015
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For the first time in history, two women have registered to vote in Saudi Arabia. Women are also forbidden from driving cars. Voter registration opened up in the rest of the country on Saturday, and candidates can begin signing up August. 30.
However, women in Saudi Arabia are still lacking in numerous rights and freedoms granted to women in other nations around the world.
“In principle, all Saudi women can obtain ID cards without asking anyone else’s permission”, he wrote.
A royal decree passed in 2011 is finally coming into effect: Women will be allowed to vote-and run-in municipal elections come December 2015. It has been a long wait for the women but a glorious outcome nonetheless. Municipal elections, which began in 2005, are the only such contests in the monarchy, and those elected have limited authority.
The right to vote in a political system as closed as Saudi Arabia’s is nearly meaningless.
King Salman bin Abdulaziz of Saudi Arabia and King Abdullah bin al-Hussein of Jordan are expected to attend the opening day of the MAKS-2015 air show in Russian Federation on August 25, albawaba.com informs. The number of seats in the municipality for the elected candidates will increase from half to two thirds this year. Even though about 60% of Saudi university graduates are female, only 15% of women have jobs. This is still a country, after all, where a woman who is gangraped can be punished for being unaccompanied when it happened – and receive a more brutal sentence than the men who raped her. It is a place where a hospital can postpone the amputation of a critically injured woman’s hand because she has no male legal guardian to authorise the procedure. “While moving in the right direction, Saudi Arabia is moving far too slowly”.
“It is a great step forward and we encourage every single move towards empowering women and girls in Saudi Arabia and ending discrimination against them”, Suad Abu-Dayyeh, a consultant with the women’s rights organization Equality Now, told ThinkProgress in an email.
